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Friday, November 28, 2014

Grasmere Lodge
has a rather more formal approach to things than your regular shack in that you congregate for a drink
around 7 and then have dinner in 8, most likely eating in groups. We were a bit
unsure about this because we’re lousy in such situations, but it ended up as
yet another fine evening. We went first for a stroll on a nature trail that
surrounds the lodge, taking forty-five minutes or so; it was a very nice walk,
but it soon started to rain and we ended up drenched. On the way back
we walked through a field of horses, some of which started following us, so we
have the new marker of being stalked by cows, sheep and horses all within the
same day. Anyway, we soon dried off. On Friday night, as I mentioned, we were the only guests, and the only other people around
for dinner were the former operators and continuing part owners,
Olly and Vicky Newbegin, up here for the special Cass weekend I described before. They mostly
live in Christchurch, so we had yet another extended conversation on that
topic, among many other things (not least, Olly’s memories of his first visit
to the US in his 20s, seeing Miles Davis and John Coltrane perform on the same
night, and other musical wonders; subsequent Internet searching suggests he
could also have talked at length about his amazing Porsche collection, but we
never got there). Several hours went by most easily. Then we returned to our
wonderful room and drank more wine. I stood outside by myself for a while in the darkness,
enjoying the sense of total exclusivity and uniqueness, which our home city can’t
really provide for all its own marvels.

The great thing
about a place like Grasmere is that you express a wish and then everyone applies
themselves to making it happen. We said that for our last day we’d like to take
a good scenic walk, maybe five hours or so, and then everyone launched
themselves into figuring out what would be the best route, the appropriate accompanying
logistics and so on. In this particular case it became almost a family project
– the current and former operators, Tom and Olly, both drove us out to the
starting point; five hours later, Tom brought his partner and baby daughter along
when he picked us up (after dropping in on the Cass bash).
They’d selected a track which wouldn’t be too affected by the previous evening’s
rain nor by the predicted westerly winds, called the Hog’s Back Trail, leading
to a tiny village called Castle Hill (which Olly apparently had a hand in
founding – the more we hear about him, the more he sounds like a benign local
Godfather). It was a perfect choice, not just for the reasons stated, but also
because it complemented the other fine walks we’ve taken – somewhat drier
terrain, with a feeling of clay and gorse, but also with plenty of woodland
stretches; a somewhat softergrandeur to
the landscapes, but again with mesmerizingly designed skies (just look at the photos). We only saw a handful of other walkers, but there were plenty
of mountain bikers, especially as the day went on. It wasn’t a particularly tough
walk in terms of ups and downs, but still tired us out well enough.

The lodge chef,
Jean-Pierre (they have an actual French chef called Jean-Pierre) made us a
lunch which even included little quiche-type things that he’d cooked that
morning; I’m telling you, they were really on top of everything. The only
trouble was that by the time we were ready to eat it, the wind was picking up
despite their best planning efforts, so we had to wait a while to find
the right spot. The New Zealand climate is a bit of a puzzler. You often go
through huge temperature swings; on today’s walk for example we eventually
found a sheltered spot to eat our lunch, and ten minutes later my fingers were
white and twisted as if on the verge of frostbite. But almost as soon as we
started walking again, I felt overheated and had to take my jacket off (there’s
a lot of putting on outer layers, then taking them off, then putting them on
again, etc.) I mentioned before the ease of sunburning – apparently New Zealand
has the highest skin cancer rate in the world. On at least five days during the
trip we’ve felt moisture in the air in a density which at home would be a certain sign of
rain in the immediate future, but here it's always receded without coming to that (our luck with the weather continued
to the end; apparently things got much worse in Christchurch on the day we
left). But it’s hard to make sweeping statements about a country based on two
weeks, no matter how engaged you think you are. Someone at work had said to
Alison that one of her prevailing impressions of New Zealand is of all the
people walking barefoot in the street. We haven’t seen that at all.

By the way, the Chronicles of Narnia films were
apparently shot close by, and so was a British production of The Lost World, at which time Bob
Hoskins and James Fox stayed in the lodge for a month or so (haven’t asked if
that’s the extent of the celebrity guest list). The only issue today was that
the Internet wasn’t working this morning, with the serious consequence that I
couldn’t take a look at Ozu in our room. However, while waiting for it to be fixed, I found
that I could get online by sitting in one of the library areas (I think the
place has three such areas, where people might play pool, chess or board games;
watch TV (the rooms don’t have them); or read such books as the Coz’s Fatherhood (to take an example which, by
divine providence, I found in my eyeline). Anyway, I monitored Ozu on and off
for half an hour or so, and he never moved from the same droopy position on the bed in
the little dog space. I haven’t seen him in the big dog space for days, which I
take to mean that he’s given up on trying to keep up with them, and that he’s
just grimly sticking it out before he gets to go home. Which won't be too long a wait as
a percentage of his entire stay, but unfortunately still isn't particularly close if he's counting the hours…

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Last night we
took a cab back to the Court Theatre, which is a great facility despite being
located in a warehouse, and we saw the play One
Man, Two Guvnors. This was big in London and New York a few years ago, and
even won a Tony for best actor, but as far as I know has yet to be produced in
Toronto. It’s a flat-out farce, driven by sheer silliness and dexterity, and
works very well as such, although if I were the director, I would have been
pushing the cast to work even faster. There’s a certain amount of picking on
the audience, and at one point the lead actor targeted me in the audience (we
were in the second row) and asked me where he should take the object of his
desire on a first date. Despite being new in town, I shot back Tequila
Mockingbird, which seemed to be a fine answer and earned a smattering of
audience applause (of course the character rejects that suggestion, over his
object of desire’s objections, and the play grinds on). This was an especially
high stakes moment for me as the previous audience participant ended up covered
in fire extinguisher foam (it’s confirmed later, for anyone who wasn’t
sure, that she was actually a plant).

Pure and Deep in Auckland was a tight, minimalist, contemporary
show, and this was basically the opposite, making for a fine counterpoint. We took a cab
to the St. Asaph Street Kitchen (I was born in St. Asaph, a different one
obviously) where despite the “…till late” thing, the guy had to check that the
restaurant staff were still able to make us a meal; fortunately, they were.
Then we walked back maybe eight blocks to the hotel, and although I’ve made
this point several times by now, it’s still eerily remarkable that you can walk
that far through a world-famous city (one of the year’s top travel
destinations per several sources) and see no
one else walking, not on the other side of the street, not anywhere (we did
see one cat), and virtually no traffic. We kept registering new sights – a row
of storefronts where a hairdresser seems to be open for business, just a few doors down from
another that’s still a wreck, still with an almost four-year-old notice on the
door inviting applicants for positions. This is something we’ll truly never
forget.

“Climb aboard one of the world’s most famous train journeys,” says the
blurb for the KiwiRail TranzApline railway, “between Christchurch and
Greymouth. Cross the fertile farmlands of the Canterbury Plains, and enjoy
thrilling vistas over deep gorges as you travel alongside the ice-fed
Waimakariri River. Traverse the mighty Southern Alps, where spectacular views
of the chiselled alpine landscape will take your breath away at every turn. Descend through thick stands of native beech forest
to your destination, Greymouth – a great base for exploring this unspoiled region
with its mighty glaciers, wild rivers and famous Punakaiki pancake.” We didn’t
do the last couple of sentences – we caught the train at 8.15 am and got off a
couple of hours later, not quite halfway through the journey, at the tiny station of Cass – the only passengers to do
so (to the apparent bemusement of some of the others). The journey is indeed
spectacular at times, but the train was packed and noisy (unfortunately we were
sitting right behind a group of American seniors, and you know what that means)
and the carriage which is open for better viewing was full of people
with selfie sticks.

We were picked up and driven to the Grasmere Lodge,
a couple of miles from Cass, where we’re spending our last two nights. Since
we couldn’t check in, we embarked pretty soon on a two and a half hour walk
down to the nearby Grasmere lake, where we followed the trails for a while
before sitting on a hillside and surveying the astonishing landscape. At one
point I counted at least seven layers to the landscape – the sky, two mountain ranges
(one with snow, one without), a row of trees, the lake with a grass frame on either side, and the yellow brush flowers in the foreground.
Even the world’s most beautiful landscapes might ordinarily be content to constitute,
say, four stunning layers.

During the walk, we attracted the attention of a
herd of cows on the other side of the wire, and they all followed us for a vast
distance, bunching together so that you’d seriously fear for your safety if you were
caught in the middle (see for yourself!) When we came back though, many of the
cows had entirely disappeared from view, reminding us of the African safari
where animals might roam vast distances. In the beef-rearing run of things,
those are some pretty lucky cows. We also attracted the attention of a lamb who
very loudly tracked us for as far as he could, and then did the same on the
way back. We later learned that his name is Marcus (doesn’t it seem like every
damn sheep nowadays is called Marcus though?) and that he’s spent too much time
around humans; they’re trying to reintegrate him with the other sheep, but it’s
not really working. We thought of offering to take Marcus home as a nice friend
for Ozu, but I guess Ozu might not be entirely sympathetic to the idea.

We had lunch, and then the owner took us and
another couple (from Christchurch, so that was an inevitable conversation topic) on a drive of the property and the surrounding area, which I’ll
summarize basically as saying that three or four local landowners appear to own the
equivalent of Toronto (but of course with a miniscule fraction of the
population). Although Cass apparently has only one resident, it has a mini-golf
range, and an annual cricket tournament/booze-up for which a few hundred people
show up and camp – it’s happening tomorrow, so the formation of the camp is fairly well
advanced. Our room, which has little in common with the Cass campsite, is enormous (we got an upgrade!), with a gas fireplace and
terrific chairs (and a mini bar we can empty out for no extra charge, if so inclined) and
for Friday night we’re the only guests in the whole place (the Christchurch couple
were on the way home), by ourselves at the far end of a very long lodge, separate from the
main building. So we just have to hope one of us doesn’t go nuts in the manner
of The Shining.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Last night we
walked about ten or fifteen minutes to Victoria Street, an area where lots of
new bars and restaurants have been opening, and went into Mockingbird, which
follows a Mexican tapas kind of concept. It was very enjoyable food and people-watching, and we stayed a pretty long time (whereas at home restaurants
usually have a defined closing time, most places here seem to advertise their closing
time only as “..till late”: in our experience though “late” often ends up being
relatively early, and we’ve frequently seen people turned away as the wheels of
closing time start to grind, but maybe that speaks to the places we're drawn to). We walked
back afterwards, struck again by the vast barren spaces, by the almost total
absence of people and cars. Within a block of the hotel there used to be a
Starbucks and a book store – you can still see the signs behind the boards; don’t
know what else was there, but presumably it would have been a street in fairly
constant motion. Not now...

A poster
announces that Kenny Rogers will soon be here performing his “Last ever New
Zealand concerts” – so to repurpose the remark I made earlier about Onehunga,
is that a promise or a threat? Actually, Auckland seems like a very long time ago – we’re
at the point of the trip, especially after yesterday, where our memories are
happily full, and to add any more might carry the risk of being
counter-productive. This is not in any way to suggest we’re not excited about
what’s left. We left the hotel this morning at around 9.30 am and had breakfast
nearby (I had mushrooms on toast, which it seems to me would be a wildly popular breakfast item if it occurred to more people).
Then we continued exploring Christchurch, taking in some different angles on
the core, different street art installations, artists using flags or weaves or
sculpture to express an element of what was lost. We wanted to know the location of
the Court theatre, which used to be downtown but has for now had to move to a
warehouse about forty minutes’ walk from where we are. Of course, the forty minutes is only if
you know the way – we had to double back twice, eventually finding it
semi-hidden behind unprepossessing chain restaurants and the like.

From there we strolled through
a couple of neighborhoods, first Riccarton and then Merrivale, going through
Hagley Park in between – I would have been ready to wager that Hagley Park might be the biggest
in the world, but it’s a mere 164 hectares; New York’s Central Park for
comparison is 341 hectares. Hagley Park might seem bigger because it’s acre
after acre of basically the same thing (wonderful flat green grass). This
coming Saturday by the way sees the Coca-Cola Christmas in the Park event,
which the website says is “one of the happiest and most magical, musical
extravaganzas on the Kiwi Christmas calendar!” (my initial web searches for
this event kept taking me back to the blurb for 2010, another apparent Internet
ghost). Anyway, these neighborhoods are all somewhat different in theory – this
one’s a bit funkier, that one a bit more high-end, and so forth – but they all
seemed much the same to us. It didn’t really matter – we enjoyed the walk. I
wore my shorts for the first time on the trip today, although I could have worn
them several times before if I’d had more foresight, or if we’d spent our days
in more stable conditions (it often gets rapidly colder on the top of
mountains, or on the decks of boats).

The earthquake isn’t as evident beyond the core (and of course you can’t
always distinguish between what’s disaster clean-up and what’s just a
construction zone, or a particularly poorly maintained residence) but it seems
that churches in particular continue to be affected. I guess that’s not
surprising given their age, and the economic difficulty of raising the money to
repair them, particularly to the standards of the new building code (we passed a construction
site promising condominiums built to 180% of the new building code, which
to someone with no knowledge of the issue sounds like something that shouldn’t really be possible). As I wrote
yesterday, Christchurch continues to be a challenge to our sense of normalcy. In the
photo below for instance, the historic building may look pretty much like any
other, until you notice there are no faces on the clocks. Time and time again,
it feels as if it ought to be possible to revive such buildings virtually at will, by applying the
construction equivalent of deeply exhaling into their lungs and pounding on
their hearts, which of course only tells you again how little I know about the
building code. And, in contrast to Hagley Park, downtown must surely have had
more trees and other vegetation before the disaster; now it has
entire blocks with little or none, which I suspect you register subliminally
even if, overshadowed by everything else, you don’t notice explicitly.

We looked in a few stores for souvenirs, since we haven’t bought anything,
but nothing grabbed us. We came back to the hotel mid-afternoon. An example of the
Novotel’s lack of classiness – whenever you use 300MB of data (which doesn’t
seem to take long – we’ve passed it twice already, just through the usual
browsing and maintaining this blog…oh, and periodically watching Ozu on the webcam, which I
guess sucks up the megabytes, just like dogs take and take in general) you get
disconnected with a warning about how they don’t consider this to be “Fair
Play,” but then they let you reconnect regardless, once you enter your room number again.
Maybe Internet access is a
finite commodity in Christchurch for some reason, but if so they should be
up-front about it, or charge a fee or something, rather than subjecting you to a series of vaguely wagging
fingers. That aside, the connection actually seems faster than the one we had in
Auckland (but not as good as Queenstown). But maybe they’re right, we should just force ourselves to stay off
there (Ally is much better at this than I am; she’s making great progress on an actual old-fashioned book,
Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies).
I mean, Ozu aside, there’s only really the two things to monitor online – the disgrace of the
Coz, or that of Canadian radio star Jian Gomeshi. Just like when we left home!

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

We left the hotel
around 9, with the same cab driver who’d picked us up at the garden centre the
other day – he once again spent almost the entire journey talking about
Fergburgers. Ah well, it’s too late to try one now. Our flight was just
slightly delayed, but once it got under way was exceptionally beautiful, flying
at low altitude over monumental views, often barely touched by clouds.

Booking the
Christchurch hotel had been an interesting exercise in navigating past
Internet ghosts; for example, the Crowne Plaza came up in many searches, and at one point I
was several steps through the online booking process, before it became evident that
the hotel hadn’t reopened after the 2010/2011 earthquakes (I think I saw
somewhere subsequently that they’re not currently planning to ever reopen).
Several sources, like the New York Times and Lonely Planet, have cited the city
as a top global travel destination since then, for the experience of visiting a
place engaged in such extensive rebuilding (185 people died). When people in
Queenstown asked us though about our next destination, they often seemed
underwhelmed that the answer was Christchurch, the cab driver for example
merely remarking disdainfully that the city is very flat…

From the sky, it
seemed much like any other sprawling town, and the impression on the ride in,
mostly through sunny residential neighborhoods, was much the same. But we weren’t
at all prepared for what we saw at the centre. We’d both been imagining a city
that would look basically “normal,” but with some pieces missing, as if with an
unusually energetic construction sector. In fact though, over 70% of the
buildings that were in the core before the earthquake are now gone; entire city
blocks have literally nothing going on within them. Large patches have now been
cleared, awaiting future redevelopment (and there’s an extensive plan in that
regard); in other places, it’s as if it all happened yesterday - you look into mangled rooms, into abandoned restaurants where the plates fell onto the floor and were never picked up again. A few stretches
are back to (one imagines) more or less what they used to be, but because they’re
not linked to much of anything else, they feel almost lonelier than the devastated
patches around them. The city has a fleet of restored trams that per the
(pre-earthquake) guidebook takes passengers “on a 3-km route past many
significant city centre sights” – now it has almost nothing to show those passengers,
circling the same few blocks like an anxious zoo animal.

The cathedral is
right by the hotel, one end of it looking fairly intact, the other entirely
broken (its future is apparently under debate). A few blocks down the street is the temporary or “cardboard” cathedral,
indeed built substantially of cardboard, but much more durable and
beautiful than that implies. You come across little art exhibits everywhere,
such as the “185 Empty Chairs”, each white chair representing someone who
died, or (in a lighter vein, obviously) painted giraffes, part of a current “Christchurch
Stand Tall” drive (Toronto did a similar thing with moose some years ago).
There’s a Re:Start Mall, fifty or so businesses operating out of shipping
containers (although again, you’d never know that's what they are); in such places, you might
imagine you’re experiencing things ten years or so after a
happy ending to The Walking Dead, as
humans get things moving again. This feeling might have been all the greater
today because it was hot and tiring to walk around, intensifying the sense of
surveying the rubble at the end of a long desert war; the streets were largely
deserted (most of the usual downtown commerce has necessarily moved elsewhere –
Ally mentioned that you’ll never see a city where parking is less of a problem).

In one spot,
there’s a wall filled with pictures of heritage buildings that are now gone,
and you wonder if the city now being slowly rebuilt around state-of-the-art new
development (a convention centre and so on) will necessarily have to survive
without a part of its soul. Not that you sense anything other than optimism in
the air though. It seemed to us at times rather unjust that back home we hear so little ongoing
news about Christchurch, when (for example) it seems we’ll spend the rest of
our lives marking 9/11 anniversaries. But Christchurch is surely better off that way, free
of swaggering wars on real or imagined perpetrators; it can't take revenge on the ground below it, and it doesn't want to run away, so things move on. You walk past a row where (say) the first two
buildings have reopened and the other two still sit empty for now (for now), and you feel
the tenacious incrementalism we claim to honour in veterans.

Anyway, that was
a major change from Queenstown obviously (and yes, it's true. much flatter), and entirely the right thing to do
(up to now the trip has been entirely pleasant and wonderful, but today
necessarily made us engage in a way we haven’t had to so far). We also walked
through the enormous Hagley Park with its fine botanical gardens, and as is our
style, covered most of the downtown city map (which must be revised frequently). Among other things, we came across
a lonely arts cinema (currently showing Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall) and (not to seem preoccupied with this topic) a
sturdy-looking strip club called Calendar Girls (with a big painted logo beaming at
those who exit the cardboard cathedral) – perhaps rather poignantly, although CG is
one of the few surviving businesses on the block, it’s being demolished by the
city soon as part of its redevelopment plan, so it has to move. We didn’t
find as many restaurants and bars as you’d expect in a city this size, but duh,
as you might say.

We’re staying at
the Novotel, which is where we ended up after the process I described. It’s not
on the level of the previous two hotels, which shows itself in any number of
little details, but then it’s not exactly a sleeping bag under a bridge either.
We can see a lot from our window, and prominent in the middle of what we see is another hotel
with a big Millennium logo on top. It’s currently closed, but apparently has
been “assessed as repairable” and may reopen one day. But not in the next
couple of years.

Even after
several trips to this side of the world, the time change still stretches your
perceptions a bit. Today on Tuesday morning I’m able to watch Ozu on the
webcam, as he (apparently) waits for his lunch on Monday afternoon (hope it’s
for his lunch, rather than that he’s waiting to be picked up to go home, which is
still a way off). Last night in Pog Mahone’s, a US sports channel ESPN was
covering the latest British soccer, and we gave up trying to figure out whether
that would possibly be live or else what kind of delay it would be on. In general,
ESPN aside, being in there last night felt almost exactly like being in a British pub, much
more so than being in a Canadian one; given the immense separation of time and
land and water, it’s a bit hard to decide whether this is a wonderful tribute
to something elementally binding, or a failure of imagination. I suppose it’s a
bit of both.

Actually I find
it hard to distinguish here between New Zealand accents and British ones –
either the former sounds very much like the latter, or else the place is awash
in imports from the old country. Anyway, we again had breakfast in the hotel,
which consumed the usual vast expanse of time, and then went back to our plan
of visiting Arrowtown, except today we did it by bus, leaving at 10.35, arriving
around twenty minutes later (which makes our failed hours of walking yesterday
seem especially pathetic, or maybe especially heroic). Much as advertised, it
really is a quaint little relic from a previous age, consisting mostly of
tiny, freshly-painted stores, many of them with names like “Gold Nugget”; if
you took the cars away, it wouldn’t take much work to transform it into a
period piece movie set. But if you’re not inclined to examine every single item
in every single gift shop, it doesn’t actually provide that much to do.

No problem for
us, as we took a two and a half hour walk above the town, along the Sawpit
Gully trail; a little steep in parts but certainly easier than our Queenstown
walks, and through slightly different terrain, providing a colour scheme of
yellows and light greens rather than the dark greens and blues of previous days,
at times criss-crossing a little stream or walking above a river. We came down
near the site of a settlement occupied by Chinese miners up to the 1920s,
apparently a hot spot for the Asian tour groups, and an enterprising small
business near there was offering dumplings for lunch, so we had some of those.

Arrowtown, rather
remarkably, has its own art cinema, Dorothy Browns, showing maybe eight or ten
different movies a day on its two screens (Queenstown has a movie theatre, but
it’s currently devoted to The Hunger
Games, which I assume is fairly typical of the programming). In a way,
going to a movie isn’t a good use of vacation time perhaps, but we thought this
would be a memorable experience in itself. The timing dictated that the movie
we saw was Israel Horovitz’s My Old Lady,
with Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith and Kristen Scott-Thomas (who, in a further bit
of vacation resonance, we saw on stage in London a few years ago). It’s hardly
a major film, but we’ll always remember it long after better films viewed in
Toronto have been forgotten, as part of the list which includes Two Days in Paris in Hong Kong, Brothers Bloom in Jerusalem, and most
recently Weekend in Copenhagen (we never
went on our last trip, in Singapore, because all we could find there was multiplex crap). Dorothy
Browns itself is a very appealing spot, with large comfortable seats and lots
of spaces between rows; many of the patrons (nearly all of them closer to
Maggie Smith’s age than to ours) had beers or wine, and I guess in New Zealand
they still follow the (to us) long-expired old custom of arbitrarily stopping
the movie halfway through so they can sell even more beer and wine.

We just missed
the 4.50 bus back so rather than wait an hour for the next one we called for a
cab; by then it was raining, and lots of people looked like they would happily
have stolen our ride if they had the chance. We came back to town and spent our
customary time in the hotel. The room has an ipod docking point with speakers
on all four walls, so as I’m writing this I’m listening to my hero Dave
Frishberg, including his anecdote about how around 1970 he met with a producer
who was planning a variety show for Bill Cosby and told Frishberg to write
something for “Coz” to perform; he had the song on the guy’s desk the next day,
and (as of the date of the recording) has been waiting 36 years to hear back.
The song (“Gotta Get Me Some ZZZ”) might now be regarded as having a rather
macabre undertone, given the Coz stories currently circling. I don’t suppose
Dave Frishberg has much profile in New Zealand otherwise. In other music news, we’ve heard Paul
Simon in at least three different restaurants, and at one point today the café near
the Chinese settlement was playing Nena’s 99
Red Balloons, of all things. Most often, the soundtrack in pubs or restaurants
seems to be trying to evoke a 70s edition of the British Top of the Pops.

We had trouble
deciding on a restaurant, and ended up at Speight’s alehouse, just because they
had a couple of non-meat dishes that weren’t salads (before that we must have looked at
fifty menus, concluding that 90% of the content never changed from one to the
next). The waitress was from Yorkshire, and confirmed that most of her colleagues were also British, excepting "a couple of kiwis in the kitchen." We stopped for a drink on the way back, overlooking the water. Although
you can only judge by what you see and hear, Queenstown really seemed dead
tonight, although it’s hard to imagine a bit of rain could stop such a party.
Anyway, it seems to be time to move on.

Monday, November 24, 2014

In addition to
what I’ve mentioned so far, Queenstown has several casinos, and across the
street from us is “the Club,” which bills itself as the city’s only “gentleman’s
club.” I went online to research the place, but couldn’t find much (its own
website is mostly “under construction,” even though the establishment seems to
have been around for years); however, I did locate a local news clip from a
year or two ago in which a junior reporter does a live broadcast from there and gets
humiliated. Anyway, I could easily slip across one evening after Ally falls
asleep, but then of course I wouldn’t be able to write about it here.

The hotel serves
a great breakfast, but it takes forever to arrive – this must be deliberate, in
the belief that if it comes too quickly it won’t seem sufficiently classy. We
wanted to get out by 10 am, which should have been easy, but we spent too much
time waiting for eggs. Our plan was to walk the “Queenstown
trail” to Arrowtown, some 26km away, a historic gold mining town; the route
leads partly along the lake and then through the mountains, and seemed to be
well within our grasp. After about an hour of walking, along a very easy,
pleasant trail, we’d accomplished only about 4 km, and since it seemed likely
only to get hotter and steeper, we decided Arrowtown was a long shot for today. At that
point we lost our momentum and wandered rather aimlessly by the lake for a
while (by no means wasted time, as you probably couldn't contrive an
ugly or even a plain spot there if you tried) before rejuvenating a bit and setting
out to walk a bit further – as far, we decided, as the Lower Shotover Bridge,
which didn’t seem like too daunting an object. However, we just kept going on and
on without any bridge ever coming into sight, so that we started to think we
might be making good progress toward Arrowtown anyway; later on we determined
that we’d taken an indirect route that added something like 4 km onto the trip,
and after over three hours of walking weren’t even halfway. At that point we
decided we’d had a nice enough walk for one day (especially in the wake of our
big climb yesterday) but it still took a while to get off the trails and
back to some version of civilization (specifically, an industrial park).
Eventually we went into a gardening centre and a woman called a cab for us,
so that's how we got back to town. Then of course it took forever to pick the right lunch place (roasted vegetable salad!). Anyway, I think every trip has at least
one day when things don’t exactly end up as planned, but it never really matters. Once again, virtually every step was marked by gorgeous
natural compositions of size and colour (looking at the photos, I see there’s virtually
never any red in them, as if they’re observing a majesty beyond earthly blood
and passion).

In January,
Queenstown's holding a music festival featuring Heart and Foreigner and Three
Dog Night! And Paul Simon and Sting are performing here in January, almost exactly a year after we saw them back home. I guess you never know what global
superstars are up to. In the meantime, one might have to settle for the nightly
Queenstown Pub Crawl, the perfect way to meet new people and have a great night
out while saving $$$, which for $35 gets you a free signature drink at each of
five bars as well as other unique drink discounts. The flyer, with little
apparent irony, points the reader in the direction of www.drinkresponsibly.co.nz. The
other big attraction in town is Fergburger, famous for its high-quality and
unique burgers (including the Cockadoodle Oink, the Chief Wiggum and the Sweet
Bambi). It’s open 21 hours a day and apparently it can take as long as an hour
to get served – we’ve walked by several times and it’s always surrounded by a
swarm, as if people had just spotted Taylor Swift. Anyway, the cab driver
brought this up, and when I said burgers didn’t really excite me much, he
entirely agreed. The difference though was that I was saying burgers didn’t really
excite me much, whereas he was saying they didn’t excite him as an actual meal,
only as a snack.

From the “testimony”
section of the Fergburger website: “Favourite fergburger moment was when a
police woman turned up to grab some food and a smashed irish bloke was
convinced she was a stripper and kept saying she had a nice arse.” Of course,
that particular piece of testimony doesn’t tell you that much about the food.
The Ferg empire also includes a baker’s next door: we have been in there, but
of course it’s nowhere near as popular – maybe the business mostly comes from
people grabbing a snack while they wait for the burger. Queenstown also has all
kinds of opportunities for adventure sports – bungy jumping, tandem hang
gliding, rafting, jet boating jumping, skydiving, canyon swinging, baton
hoisting…actually I just added in that last one. Between the natural wonders
and the unnatural embellishments, you can see why people might say it's as good as it gets.

We wandered
around for a while in the evening, and everything felt content and quietly
celebratory – people sitting on the beach or the surrounding low walls, watching the sun
descend toward the mountains. We ate in Eichardt’s, a tapas bar attached to a
hotel. A woman came in and greeted the barman, taking him by surprise; she sat
down and talked as he made her a drink, and we overheard a lot of it – she’s
here for the weekend from Melbourne; he’s off soon for six months in Europe. It
made Queenstown seem like a town of infinite possibility. Then we had a couple
of drinks in Pog Mahone’s Irish pub, where it was hard to imagine the possibility of them ever talking
the crowd into accepting closing time.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

We were both not quite at our best for much of yesterday. I felt a bit overtired and also had the
feeling of not enough downtime: obviously absurd, but a reflection of how much
time I spend writing these notes and carrying out other such recurring
self-imposed tasks. Ally has had a cold for the last several weeks. Then for
the first half of yesterday, with the flight and then the bad weather, we felt deprived of fresh air. And we don’t quite
feel we’ve been eating in the ideal way (I know, I know, isn’t that just called
“being on vacation”…?) Anyway, I think a solid night’s sleep in our fine room,
and a slower start today, dealt with much of that. The forecast
suggests we should have two days of fine weather, with perhaps a few showers
the day after that; it predicts things will decline immediately after our departure (just
as they did in Auckland!)

We had breakfast
in the hotel, took all the time we wanted, and left around noon, returning
around seven hours later. We spent most of the intervening time climbing to Ben
Lomond’s peak, some 1750m above the town. The official track to the summit
starts from the top of the cable car, but we put ourselves at an early
disadvantage by walking up from town instead (some of this stretch replicates the walk
we did yesterday, and crosses the mountain bike paths at various points – they seemed
quite heavily used today). The official route, not including that, lasts between 4 to 6
hours return. It’s fairly steep most of the way (the official material gives
this a difficulty grading of “moderate’) and for the last hour becomes rocky
and very steep (this section is “hard”).
But at the end of that you do indeed reach an actual peak (not some
manufactured fake peak with a platform or whatever) from which you can see for
miles, above or at eye level with the clouds, and staring at vast expanses of
sky, rock, snow and water, all stretching forever as if it had never been
imagined that the world would need to contain anything else (for once, I think
some of today’s photos may actually have captured the scale and the colours,
despite my unsophisticated camera-handling).

Before we entered
that final “hard” stretch, Ally was flagging and thinking seriously of turning
back – she was saying I should go on alone, which of course I wasn’t going to
do. We sat on a bench to eat our lunch (actually it’s the only bench on the
entire walk, and just happened to show up as we were having this conversation)
and then she felt able to give it another try, which ultimately led to her glorious
triumph. So now whenever Ally is unsure of herself, I’m going to tell her to
remember the bench. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is common to turn back
though. It seems the route is most popular in the morning, because we passed a
lot of people returning (maybe over fifty in total); we were at the summit at
the same time as I think eight others (we reached it around 3.45). Only a few
were still ascending when we returned (including a group of six very
slow-moving girls, whom we’d passed hours earlier), which made sense because it
wouldn’t be much fun to be there when it gets dark (the temperature drops off
very heavily here too at night – that aside though the weather was great today, warm but
not crippling, with a cooling breeze here and there, and perfect clarity in the
air). Anyway, it was certainly faster coming back, despite the occasional
strain on the knees (we were at the low end of the 4 to 6 hour range, given that the initial walk up to the starting point doesn’t count, but there were plenty of people moving faster than us), and we didn’t think it would undermine our achievement too
much to take the cable car back down. Unsurprisingly, the “Skyline
complex” as it’s called is a tacky place full of undemanding diversions; most
of the visitors seemed to belong to Asian tour groups. At least the woman who sold us
our tickets was impressed with our achievement. But of course, once the
momentum broke, it was hard to get it back, so we were virtually staggering by
the time we reached the hotel. Needless to say, we didn’t do much for the few
hours after that.

Ally points out
an article in which our hotel made the cut for one of the city’s notable
attractions, saying it’s “set apart from the chain hotels and lodges that
dominate Queenstown” and that it “started as a pet project for the original,
design-loving owner-operators” who fitted out every suite with Eames recliners,
Philippe Starck lighting and so forth (Ally keeps making fun of me for how much
I like the fireplace). It’s certainly a wonderful place to spend time,
especially when we can contrast this all-enveloping comfort with the
self-imposed hardships of the day. It’s not hard to figure out how the features in the hotel get
distributed – if there’s an Eames recliner, you can bet Ally will take that,
and I’ll be at whatever desk works best for the laptop.

It occurred to me
that I lied yesterday when I said I bought a stamp with a hobbit on it – it was
actually Gandalf ($2). But I assume other denominations have hobbits. We ate at
nearby Winnie’s, a straightforward beer and pizza joint where we ordered one of
the only two meatless pizza options; when we left, the place was transitioning
into a “nightclub.” Perhaps this was a sign of greater energy yet to be
unleashed, but the town didn’t seem too busy when we were out and about. We drank some
wine in the hotel bar and the waiter charged us less for the bottle, in
recognition that we hadn’t shown up earlier for our complimentary pre-dinner
drink (perhaps a staple of New Zealand hotels given that our Auckland hotel offered the
same daily treat – we never showed up for it there either).

Saturday, November 22, 2014

We left the hotel at 9 and headed for the airport, where I
can truly say we’ve never checked in and gone through security so smoothly (I
don’t even think it took five minutes). The flight to Queenstown took off on
time, and after a couple of hours we started our descent over deep green
mountain ranges, down and down until the little town was close enough to touch….and
then suddenly the plane rose up again, the landing aborted because of wind
issues. We were informed we’d make one more attempt; if that didn’t work we’d
have to divert to Christchurch (not sure what would have happened then).
Fortunately it was second time lucky, although I felt a bit queasy for an hour afterwards (Ally was OK). It was a pretty
miserable day, especially bad for the town as it had been the morning of the
inaugural Queenstown marathon, with entrants from some twenty countries (as we
drove in, we passed some drenched back-of-the-packers). We’re staying in a
downtown hotel called the Spire, in a large “de luxe King suite.” As we
waited to check in, we were wondering whether we got lucky in even finding a room
during the marathon weekend (given that we didn’t plan the trip that long ago), but
once we saw the room we realized there’s probably no one in the race who would
have wanted to pay that much. I guess I must have known the cost at the time I
made the reservation, but I subsequently forgot. Anyway, we're glad we did it. The
room has a gas fireplace, many gadgets, and better wifi than we had in Auckland
(one of the Auckland waiters told us it’s a problem throughout the city there). The
name “the Spire” is a bit of a misnomer though as it only has around ten rooms
and isn’t very tall – from our room we have a wonderful view in the background,
but in the foreground it’s dominated by the roof of the pub across the street.

We had lunch in the lobby bar, and soon after that things
started to brighten up; we went out around 3 pm. Queenstown is built around an inlet on Lake
Wakatipu, with spectacular views of mountains in all directions; our hotel is
right downtown, mere steps from the lake as they say. We walked around the
water for a while, the wind and rain steadily dying down (at around 3.30 pm,
the presumably very last marathoner passed by, 1 km from the finish line, and long after all spectators had called it a day). I’d had it in
my mind that the town would be somewhat refined and rarified, I don’t know why,
but this was obviously an unrealistic notion for such a popular destination;
actually the waterfront is a series of bars, burger joints and the like, with a
standard resort vibe. We left that behind and then spotted the start of a
hiking trail, heading up a mountain; the map indicated various possibilities
for walks, from 45 minutes to 8 hours. We ended up doing around an hour and a
half, along quite steep and often slippery trails, through woodlands and
ultimately allowing us fine views of the snow-capped, cloud-rimmed peaks across
the lake. The walk intersected often with an extensive network of mountain bike trails,
or one can take a cable car up to a big restaurant. We didn’t see anyone else walking for
most of the way, but the numbers increased as the day went on (it stays light until 9 pm, so lots of possibilities for evening hikes). We walked around
the town a bit, just confirming the impression set out above; perhaps it’s
telling that according to TripAdvisor, the top attraction here isn’t any aspect
of the natural wonder but rather the “Fear Factory,” some kind of haunted house
set-up.

That aside, the
most prominent draw is the Milford Sound, a fiord which has sometimes
been judged one of the world’s leading attractions, and which Kipling called the eighth
wonder of the world. Queenstown is the most common base for traveling
there, but it’s still 300 km away, and per the most conventional approach to
the trip would involve many hours sitting on a coach. Of course, the few hours
at the fiord would probably stick in our memory long after the tedium of the
bus journey had faded away, but we’re still finding it hard to commit to such a
plan. It’s also possible to be flown in, but that seems overly
extravagant, notwithstanding the earlier comments about the room. At this
moment it seems more appealing to spend our days walking, but perhaps we’ll
change our minds tomorrow.

The Lord of the
Rings/Hobbit movies constitute no part of our reason for coming to New Zealand or
of our trip planning (haven’t seen the recent ones, presumably never will), but
apparently parts of them were shot in this vicinity, as was Top of the Lake (did see that). It’s
hard to avoid the Peter Jackson stuff though – when I bought a stamp the other
day it had a hobbit on it, and the Air New Zealand in-flight video is done in
the style of the movies. They are inexplicably proud of this video as we’ve
seen it advertised several times on billboards. Anyway, just thought I’d get
that content out of the way.

When we arrived,
the hotel people did a big routine about needing to make a dinner reservation
because everywhere in town would be full, but this was plainly overstating things. Regardless, we were happy to eat at the hotel’s own restaurant because it’s
apparently one of Queentown’s best: we had a tasting menu which left us
seriously overstuffed (and added very significantly to our excess meat
consumption). The restaurant was otherwise empty long before we were finished;
a bit more surprisingly, the surrounding streets cleared out too. However, we
could hear the boom of late night partying, not too many blocks away. We went
back upstairs and hung out for a while in front of our fireplace! Later on I
had a bath; however, I didn’t take up the suggestion made to us earlier, of
lying in the bathtub with the shutters to the main room open, so as watch a
movie….

Friday, November 21, 2014

It seems we’re both moving past the phase of being awake for prolonged periods during the night, if only because of stepping up the wine consumption. Either way, we had breakfast at the hotel again
this morning, and this time we even ordered eggs. I even had a sausage on the
side. I think we’ve eaten more meat this week than we have for a long time, albeit just
in a light kind of way – a pie filling here, a pizza topping there. No doubt we
could find vegetarian restaurants if we were looking for them, but the average establishment
doesn’t seem to offer much choice in that vein. It’s also becoming more evident
to us how the city loves its booze – the streets seemed quiet on
Tuesday, but I think they’ve grown steadily more raucous every night since
then. And I’m writing this paragraph before Friday night hits.

We returned to the ferry terminal, dominated by a cruise
ship, just as it was the other day (today was the something Princess, and the
other day it was the something else Princess). We’ve never set foot on a cruise
ship, and probably aren’t likely to, but they’re interesting in an abstract
kind of way, like Las Vegas (we’ve never been there either; aren’t likely to).
We caught another ferry at 10 am, this time to Waiheke island, around 35
minutes away. This is a much more popular destination than Ranjitoto was the other
day, hence requiring a much bigger boat; on arrival, the hubbub was more typical of an airport than a wharf. Naturally, most of the crowd
dispersed into taxis, buses and so on, leaving just a handful of people to start walking (I know our disregard for people who never walk
anywhere is probably a bit tedious; maybe we’ll be forced to change our views
one day, but our current thought is that if gets to the point that we can only
go on vacation by sitting on a bus or an ocean liner, then we’ll spend the rest
of our lives at home). We embarked on one of the loveliest walks I can remember,
following the western coast of the island, around a point called Church Bay. It’s
a beautiful route, not very steep for most of the way; every step at first was
like a study in exaggerated greens and blues (the temperature was again about
nineteen degrees, as it has been every day of our trip so far, but we’ve
learned you can burn up pretty effectively in that), suddenly opening out onto
the bay, a landscape you might choose as the last thing you ever see, then descending into woodland on the other side. The countryside was so immaculately varied
and graceful from the start that it almost seemed artificial; eventually it largely was artificial, as the trail started to wind past a succession of
mega-properties, some of them apparently working vineyards, others presumably
holiday homes. At one point we saw a sign advertising patches of undeveloped
land for sale at prices of $3 million for 10 acres or something like
that – if we correctly grasped a conversation we overheard later, this may be a
one-time only fundraising move by the island government, motivated by recent
over-spending (the play last night took some caustic shots at how all the
construction activity now is for the benefit of foreign millionaires).

That section of the walk took over two hours, coming out on
a road where we briefly got lost, just like the group in front of us. Once
oriented, we walked to Oneroa, a little town with a beach community kind of
vibe, our journey periodically decorated by roadside collections of old
furniture and other oversized garbage (later, perusing the island’s “Waiheke
Weekender” paper, we learned that it’s the annual occasion when such junk gets
picked up – however, most residents seem to have disregarded the instruction to
assemble the items neatly). The entrance to Oneroa is through a park called “Alison
Park,” which frankly isn’t much to write home about. We had lunch and did some
minor browsing, then returned to the ferry terminal along another woodland
trail, taking a brief walk along a beach in the other direction before
catching the 4 pm boat back. This only covered a tiny percentage of what the
island has to offer, and you could certainly spend an entire vacation there,
taking a different breathtaking walk every day. However, it seems from observing the return journey (and here I refer back to my earlier remarks) that many visitors
may instead spend the time overindulging in the many wine tasting
opportunities.

I think I might refine my earlier remarks about it seeming
less diverse here than at home – as time goes on, we’re becoming more aware of
the Maori culture and presence, indicated in ways both large (monuments, place
names) and small (a few words on menus or elsewhere); something over 10% of
Auckland’s population is Maori. Anyway, the vacation magic has entirely worked
its familiar spell – we feel like we’ve known the place for years, and we’ve
achieved our favourite thing, of drawing a pretty good mental map of the heart
of yet another notable world city (although Ally’s mental map is always far
better than mine). So we can happily move on now to somewhere else.

We ate in yet another restaurant within steps of the hotel,
a very nice but sadly all-but-deserted place called Touquet, where I had duck
and Ally, bowing to the inevitable, had lamb. The owner gave us some free
limoncello, which went a long way to knocking us out for the night. We managed
to stay awake for a final drink at the hotel bar. Unlike previous nights, this
and other places had a bouncer at the door, and police were circling both in
cars and on foot, apparently confirming our expectations about Fridays in New
Zealand; the streets were clearly busier and more booze-sodden. By the time we
wound down though, the action had mostly moved on elsewhere.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

We were both awake again for a while during the night before going
back to sleep; possibly not an ideal pattern, but it isn’t adversely affecting anything.
We set out at 9 and embarked on a defined “coast to coast” walk. Per the official
website, this “is a 16km hike across
Auckland from one coast to the other, from the Waitemata to the Manukau. It
takes you through landscapes shaped by 600 years of Māori occupation, and
through some of our finest natural and built heritage areas offering panoramic
views along the way. The walkway is part of Te Araroa - The Long Pathway, a
continuous 3000km walking track from Cape Reinga to Bluff.”

It took us about
five hours, including some steep climbing and descending, and only a brief stop
for lunch. The route is marked by orange arrows, but it has to be said that
these are inconsistently placed at best, disappearing (as far as we could tell)
for long periods – if we’d been relying solely on these we would have been
hopelessly lost (fortunately, Ally had downloaded a map of the route). Also,
the “coast to coast” label isn’t actually accurate, in that the walk ends in
the neighborhood of Onehunga, separated from the coast by a big ugly highway.
It may be true, as the website says, that “Onehunga has the distinction of
electing the first woman Mayor in the British Empire, Mrs Elizabeth Yates, in
1893,” but that hardly matters now, given the down-at-heel, seedy feel of the
place (the slogan on the sign is “something old, something new,” but I think
the latter part is more an aspiration than a promise). Also, the write-up tells
you that there are plenty of refreshment options along the route, but we didn’t
encounter anything at all for the first three hours (and even then, it took a small
detour). This didn’t matter so much to me, because I’d already eaten something,
but Ally, being decent and trusting, walked 10km or so on an empty stomach..

With those
complaints out of the way, it was a fine, often very scenic walk. The first
part took us through territory we’d already largely covered, to the “Auckland
domain”, a huge green space including the city’s museum, placed on an imposing
hill (seeing it from the Sky Tower the other day, we’d assumed it was a
government building or other site of power). From there we walked to Mount
Eden, the tallest ex-volcano in the city, capped by a monument and what I think is
some kind of historic surveying device. Then we went to One Tree Hill, a few
metres shorter than Mount Eden, but feeling grander and more imposing,
surrounded by huge grounds on which we saw our first sheep of the trip
(probably not the last – there are some 50 million more). In better days, One Tree Hill did indeed have a single tree at its peak, but it was cut down about a decade
ago. Much of the walk comes with explanations of its significance to Maori
history and culture or to that of New Zealand generally, and of course provides
many wonderful views, or put another way, opportunities at which to look back at the tiny downtown high-rises and to congratulate ourselves for
what we’d achieved. In between all of this we took in many residential
streets, often very grand ones, and more sporting fields and facilities than we’ve
ever seen anywhere: if what we saw today was representative, then New
Zealanders ought to be the fittest people on the planet (it’s not clear that
they actually are). It also seemed today that the University of Auckland, with
its six campuses, must constitute half the city (subsequent research indicates
it has some 25,000 students, less than half the size of the University of
Toronto, but for today at least it seemed like the most alluringly imposing
institution in the world).

We took a bus
back from Onehunga (the buses are frequent, but apparently all run hopelessly
late, so that if you think you’re catching the 14.43, it’s probably the 14.28),
and we arrived back in Britomart. Ah, Britomart!Early
on in the trip we saw signs for this, and I assumed it must be the trashiest
establishment in town, a dive getting by on cut-price underwear deals and
suchlike. But it turns out that Britomart is actually a high-end neighbourhood,
where (contrary to my remarks yesterday) you can glide from one gleaming designer store to another. I can (just about) see how the “Brit-“ piece could
connote classiness, but the “-omart” bit confounds me. Actually, it seems the name has
some kind of historical derivation having nothing to do with any of this, but
who cares about that? Anyway, from there we went back to the hotel, stopping
for gelato on the way.

Auckland doesn’t seem (this week at least) to have much of a
downtown arts scene – the theatres are mostly sitting empty, perhaps
advertising a one-week touring show next March or something like that. The
Rolling Stones are performing here next Saturday; the Foo Fighters in February,
and Drake too. The only current production we could identify was a play called Pure and Deep, written by Toa Fraser,
and we went to see that tonight (we’d overlooked at least one other current option
though, a production called Famous Flora,
set in a brothel and staged from 6.30 to 8 pm in a venue then taken over
by a “troupe of exotic dancers” – the director was sitting behind us and
describing it to someone else). Pure and
Deep is a modest piece to the extent that it only has two actors (each
playing multiple parts) and no set or props other than two chairs, but this is
often when theatre is most captivating, evoking complexity and meaning just
through the force of writing and performance. It’s very specifically a play
about New Zealand, reflecting on the country’s loss of identity in the face of
social media, bad culture, bad food and so on, but then of course these are
universal issues too, so I don’t think we missed too much. It was a wonderful
experience, and we stayed up late afterwards in the bar under the hotel,
drinking our wine, eating pizza and chicken sliders, and discussing the whole
thing. And the waiter didn’t even charge us for the chicken sliders.